Hijacking the Holocaust

International Holocaust Remembrance Day has now come and gone. It wouldn’t be such a bad idea for it to finally be gone for good.

After all, this most recent commemoration was part travesty and complete misnomer. A day that had little to do with the actual Holocaust. President Trump’s campaign promise to clamp down on illegal immigration proved, in the minds of his many critics, that he was Hitler incarnate. Naturally ICE agents conducting raids in sanctuary cities were Gestapo. Europeans did nothing but stand by as their Jewish neighbors were rounded up; this time, in America, with upheavals over ICE, some people did not stand by and got themselves shot.

Everyone had apparently forgotten that there were no sanctuary cities in Europe for Jews. The analogy was already warped. Why ruin it further?

The systematic murder of 6 million Jews isn’t exactly analogous to illegal immigrants—many with rap sheets—guaranteed a free plane ticket back to their country of origin. No death camps, gas chambers or crematoria, just atmospheric turbulence and that fateful choice between a KIND Bar and Cheez-It Crackers.

The systematic murder of 6 million Jews isn’t exactly analogous to illegal immigrants—many with rap sheets—guaranteed a free plane ticket back to their country of origin. No death camps, gas chambers or crematoria, just atmospheric turbulence and that fateful choice between a KIND Bar and Cheez-It Crackers.

If the Holocaust is no longer a stand-alone atrocity where the Final Solution applied to Jews, and Jews alone, then it’s time to forgo the fake tears and false equivalencies and co-opt someone else’s tragedy. Holocaust inversion is the one cultural appropriation that dares not speak its name.

Almost miraculously, Vice President JD Vance managed to deliver a statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day without mentioning Jews or Nazis—as if it was just another ordinary universalist day.

You’re either remembering why there are so few Jews in the world, or you’re stealing an atrocity that doesn’t belong to you so you can concoct yet another reason to detest Donald Trump.

You’re either remembering why there are so few Jews in the world, or you’re stealing an atrocity that doesn’t belong to you so you can concoct yet another reason to detest Donald Trump.

How do I know this to be true? In 2009, in the early days of the Obama administration, I represented an immigrant pro bono in a removal case. He was being held in a detention center in New Jersey where a fellow inmate had been found dead in his cell. ICE agents told me that I couldn’t have picked a worse time to practice immigration law.

They were right. Obama, who went on to earn the moniker “Deporter-in-Chief,” said during the first days of his presidency that “our nation, like all nations, has the right and obligation to control its borders and set laws for residency and citizenship. And no matter how decent they are, no matter their reasons, the 11 million who broke these laws should be held accountable.”

Obama made good on those words. More than 3 million illegal immigrants were deported from the United States during his two terms. The vast majority didn’t receive even minimal due process—no hearing, with not even an interpreter present.

Curiously, all this was happening, and “Holocaust” or “Hitler” was never uttered in public. Obama’s harsh immigration policy did not cause Americans to lose their minds. ICE agents managed to do their jobs without street fights and charges of Gestapo tactics.

Oh, and I improbably won that immigration case.

It was also a different time in Holocaust memory. The United States Memorial Museum was still a hot ticket among Smithsonian offerings. “Schindler’s List” still found its way into cocktail party banter.

That’s because the Holocaust was the Holocaust! It wasn’t some one-size-fits-all stand-in for disagreements with your government.

No one back then would be so historically careless as to mischaracterize the Holocaust as a dispute over immigration policy. Jews weren’t immigrants in Europe. They were law-abiding citizens, productive members of German, Austrian, French, Hungarian, Czechoslovakian, Belgian, Greek, Italian and Dutch societies—standouts in nearly every category of human accomplishment. They had nothing in common with Venezuelan gang members, Colombian cartels, and Somali welfare scammers.

That’s the suicidal path Europe took under Hitler: depleting the continent of a people that happened to be one of its most valuable resources.

Europe never recovered. Ironically, today it is suffering through a mass migration miscalculation—serving as the staging ground for the next caliphate.

The pious symbolism and tell-tale signs of collapse somehow evaded the moral comprehension of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, comedian Kathy Griffin and the always smug Stephen Colbert. Walz compared illegal immigrants in his state to Anne Frank. Griffin accused ICE of interning children in concentration camps. And Colbert concluded that ICE was actually worse than the Gestapo because the former wear masks.

Iconography of the Holocaust corrupted for cheap laughs and political score-settling. What’s next? “All aboard Amtrak to Auschwitz!”

Any child of an illegal immigrant hiding in a Minneapolis attic will most definitely not end up dead in Bergen-Belsen.The father of the poster child for these temporary detentions left his son alone in a locked and running car. Other children were trafficked and have no parents to go home to.

The Gestapo didn’t need to wear masks because the German people, unfortunately, were behind them. In sanctuary cities, large numbers of radicalized demonstrators are eager to attack ICE agents and dox them on social media. Of course, their faces are covered.

Trivializing an atrocity is obscene. Historical events are not props for politicians,comedians and virtue signalers on social media. The Nazis who perpetrated these crimes were uniquely evil. Today that word is casually misapplied to describe Republicans, MAGA, the police and ICE. Trump may be many unflattering things, but he’s not Hitler—no matter what his designs on Greenland may be. Just ask the Jews in Israel, and on college campuses, who he has rescued.

The Nazis perfected mass murder. The scale and sadism of the Holocaust was incomparable—the shaved heads and numbered arms. Over 1 million children one moment were crying, the very next they were reduced to smoke and ash.

Is anything like that happening on the streets or in the detention centers of Minneapolis?

The conflation of words that don’t belong in the same sentence has become the hallmark of contemporary moral outrage. Would anyone care about Palestinians if their self-inflicted plight didn’t conveniently elevate antisemitism into a moral crusade? Only by taking liberties with language can casualties of war be likened to a genocide.

The anti-ICE protests look less like “peaceful assembly,” which is permissible under the First Amendment, and more like crowds high on the sugar rush of open rebellion. The cursing and threatening of ICE agents on social media seem especially unhinged, not the kind of “petitioning of government” contemplated by the Founding Fathers.

Yes, there have been two killings of demonstrators by ICE agents who have been relieved of their duties. And Trump has now halted ICE operations in sanctuary cities precisely to avoid all this appalling violence.

But negligent, inexperienced law enforcement is not the sole reason behind these deaths. Deliberately placing themselves in harm’s way, carrying a weapon, resisting arrest, refusing to heed the instructions of federal officers, the incitement of public officials, and the unwillingness of local police to assist in crowd control, have made bullet-ridden chaos inevitable.

Regardless of one’s view on immigration and Homeland Security’s mishandling of law enforcement, the Holocaust doesn’t belong in this conversation. International Holocaust Remembrance Day was not created as kitsch—a tawdry symbol of man’s inhumanity to man, a mere token for Jews and a talisman for everyone else.